February 2010

In December I blogged about the contaminated camps in Kosovo, to which the Roma population was displaced in 1999. I noted that the writer of the UK Sun piece about it used the passive tense, not assigning a culprit to the “ethnic cleansing” in June, 1999 that forced the Roma from their homes, for example, in Kosovska Mitrovica. So readers naturally would assume it was the Serbs who cleansed the Roma and are responsible for their current predicament. At the time, I merely stated — based on numerous sources I’ve accumulated over the years — that the Roma were cleansed by Albanians, but a mainstream foreign source just this month said it outright. A Feb. 16 item in B92 about the halting by the European Council Human Rights Commissioner of forcible Roma returns to Kosovo closed with the following paragraphs:

In a report published last summer, Human Rights Watch said that the Roma district in the northern city of Kosovska Mitrovica was attacked by ethnic Albanians in June 1999.

“By June 24, the district had been looted and burned to the ground, and its 8,000 inhabitants had fled. Many were resettled by the UN in camps in a heavily contaminated area located near a defunct lead mine. The move was originally intended to be temporary, yet about 670 Roma still live in camps near the site, with damaging consequences for their health,” said the report.

Note that June, 1999 was already after the Albanians won their war. So why did the gypsies, of all people, still need to be cleansed? What was the real goal of that war?

On Jan. 23rd an article written by Dan Diker, a senior foreign policy analyst at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, appeared in The Jerusalem Post. It was “based on the Jerusalem Viewpoints that was published at the Institute for Contemporary Affairs at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.” The piece was titled “Is Abbas Ignoring Israel and Eyeing Kosovo?” I wrote a letter to the editor at the Jerusalem Post, but probably too late, as it had been almost two weeks since the article ran. So here is what my letter said:

Dear Editor:

It’s a shame that in reaching for distinctions between the Israel and Kosovo cases Dan Diker writes that “there is no legal or historical comparison,” adding that a Palestinian unilateral declaration of independence would “violate internationally sanctioned agreements” between the two sides. As if UN Resolution 1244 reaffirming Serbian sovereignty over its Jerusalem (Kosovo) wasn’t violated by the Kosovo secession — a resolution that Kosovo-Albanians and their U.S. benefactors would dearly like everyone to forget indeed.

The example of Res. 1244 is in addition to the numerous 1998-99 internationally-mediated agreements that Serbia abided by while the Kosovo Liberation Army, now the “legitimate government” of Kosovo, reinforced its positions and proceeded with the violence, now with an upper hand gained by Serbian withdrawals.

Mr. Diker also writes that “mindful of Serbia’s indicted leaders Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic who had slaughtered thousands,” the Palestinians are delegitimizing Israel “as a lever to criminalize and isolate it in the international community.”

Precisely what the Bosnian-Muslims, Albanians, and Croatian Nazi-nostalgists successfully did to Serbia. Lamentably, Mr. Diker appears entirely credulous of the Muslim-originated Western narrative of Karadzic and Milosevic as butchers. In worrying about the petitions seeking the arrest of senior Israeli officials, Mr. Diker never stops to consider that perhaps Milosevic and Karadzic were similarly victims of propaganda that made its way directly from the Bosnian and Croatian Ministries of Information into our newspapers. Which allowed a replay in 1999 Kosovo, as the late Wall St. Journal reporter Daniel Pearl uncovered by the end of that year.

When it comes to the countless manufactured “Serbian crimes” — the reality behind which pales in comparison to the never-printed Albanian, Bosnian and Croatian crimes against Serbs — if Jews had maintained the healthy dose of skepticism they ask the world to maintain in hearing about the real and imagined “Israeli crimes against Palestinians,” Israel would not be in as dire a position as it finds itself today. A position from which otherwise vigilant people like Mr. Diker now have to work doubly hard to dig us out of.

Belgrade, 18 Feb 2010 – Serbian Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic met today with US senators George Voinovich and Jeanne Shaheen and agreed with them that Serbia and the United States have developed good bilateral relations after US Vice President Joseph Biden’s successful visit to Serbia. […]

Since I’ve been keeping an informal log of evidence that Serbia remains open to friendship with the U.S. even as we keep kicking her, I’ll just link to a March 1999 NY Times piece titled “On Killing Serbs” by A.M. Rosenthal, where he wrote: “[I]f the air bombardment goes on, it will occur to [Americans] that down there on the ground getting killed are people called Serbs who never raised a finger against us, were once our allies and long to be allies again.”

Well, that never did occur to Americans, but the Serbs did — and all too much still do — long to be our allies.

BELGRADE, BUJANOVAC — A member of a multi-ethnic police unit in Bujanovac, southern Serbia, was seriously injured on Sunday in an explosion.

Reports said that his wife, and two young women who were passing by, sustained minor wounds in the incident. All four are ethnic Albanians.

The bomb was planted under a Serbian police (MUP) vehicle, while the officer was identified as Blerim Mustafa, 39.

Interior Minister Ivica Dačić confirmed the incident and said that Mustafa has a fractured leg and ribs, while his wife, and the passers-by, were not seriously hurt.

The car exploded several hundred meters away from the municipal building in this town, in an ethnic Albanian neighborhood. “There are indications that this was a terrorist attack,” said Dačić.

The reason for this, according to the minister, is because the victims were “not only MUP members but also regular citizens”.

Mustafa was transported to Belgrade for treatment today, where Emergency Center Director Vladimir Đukić said that his condition was serious, and that he had suffered injuries to both his legs, ribcage, and head.

Dačić was there as the officer was brought to Belgrade, and told reporters that MUP will do all they can to make sure that this terrorist act does not further jeopardize the political stability and the life of all communities that live in the southern area.

“I can assure you that we will not allow for the crossing over of some terrorist groups from the territory of the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija, and from parts of Macedonia, into southern Serbia, in order to engage in such acts of terrorism,” said the minister.

Dačić also revealed that the investigation of the scene so far showed that the explosives were not planted “professionally”, and that otherwise the blast could have killed the officer and all those close to the site.

Police Director Milorad Veljović was in Bujanovac today where he said that the attack, staged ahead of Statehood Day celebrations, was a terrorist message to the state, and that the state would “respond adequately”.
…Dačić said that the investigation would reveal the attackers’ motives, but that he believed it was organized by Albanians who were against the multi-ethnic police.

The Mustafa family was twice before the target of terrorist attacks: first in 2000, when Blerim’s uncle Cemal was killed, and then in 2005, when his brother Besnik was wounded.

The volatile southern region, known informally as the Preševo valley, is home to the largest ethnic Albanian community in Serbia outside of Kosovo.

After the 1999 war in the province, the conflict there escalated, but was resolved through international mediation in 2001.

More recently, a police car was blown up in front of the Bujanovac police station in the summer of 2008, while in Septamber 2009, police found a large cache of weapons buried in a fuel tank in the municipality of Končulj.

MUP’s elite Gendarmerie (Žandarmerija) force, which patrols the area, also came under attack last year, while another explosion in front of a residential building was recorded a short while later.

…when a much more questionable “genocide” that Bosnians supposedly witnessed/experienced/heard about seems to be causing Bosnians to engage in all kinds of mischief in their new countries. Here’s the latest would-be satire, if satire could be as over-the-top as this:

UTICA — The Bosnian woman accused of trying to strangle her baby Christmas Eve in Utica may have experienced horrible atrocities during a wave of genocide committed against Muslims in Eastern Europe during the 1990s, her attorney said Thursday.

“There’s no clear reason, and she is truly a very tragic figure at this point,” Marthage said after Oneida County Court Judge Barry M. Donalty found Mehmedovic mentally incompetent to stand trial. Donalty ordered her to be held at a psychiatric facility up to a year for further treatment.

“The atrocities that human beings can inflict on each other just continue, and it’s so sad,” Marthage said. “But we’ll do everything we can do to try to help her and defend her to the best of our ability.”

Mehmedovic was arraigned on charges of attempted second-degree murder and two counts of second-degree assault. She will return to court to be prosecuted only if her condition improves, otherwise she will continue to be treated and evaluated by the state Office of Mental Hygiene in the years ahead.

Mehmedovic came to Syracuse in 2000 and later moved to Utica with her boyfriend, Mirsad Rekic, more than a year ago, Marthage said. Together they had a child, who suffered brain injury due to lack of oxygen allegedly at the hands of his mother.

When responding Utica police and firefighters asked Mehmedovic if she choked the baby until he turned blue that night, she reportedly answered “Yes.”

When Mehmedovic was later questioned by two psychiatrists after the incident, however, there appeared to be signs that Mehmedovic was haunted by something in her past while she lived in Eastern Europe, Marthage said.

After Bosnia declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1992, the Serbians in that region were incited by Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to terrorize the local Muslim population with mass shootings, concentration camps, and forced withdrawals from their villages.

As women and girls faced the terror of brutal rape, they had little choice but to flee the region as refugees. Many of those families relocated to the Utica area, where a Bosnian population has flourished in the years since.

“I think she was the victim of many atrocities in her native country,” Marthage said after the proceeding.

“She will not speak freely with the psychiatrists about what may have happened,” he added, “but she seemed to indicate there was something that occurred and she didn’t want to go into any detail.”

As Mehmedovic stood in court Thursday, the judge asked her several times whether she knew who Marthage was as he stood next to her. After staring at Marthage for several moments, the judge repeated the question as it was translated by Bosnian interpreter Sead Hadziabdic.

Mehmedovic finally said she recognized Marthage, and the judge then asked if she understood the proceedings against her. Mehmedovic mumbled something, and the interpreter chuckled.

First we had Bosnian Anes Subasic along with an Albanian being part of the North Carolina-based international terror plan, whose plotters were arrested last summer. And last month the Colorado-based 9/11-anniversary terror plot — disrupted in September — turned up two more suspects:

Two men who traveled to Pakistan with Najibullah Zazi were arrested early Friday morning in New York.

“Early this morning Adis Medunjanin and Zarein Ahmedzay were arrested by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York as the result of an ongoing investigation,” FBI spokesman Rich Kolko said.

The full list of charges will be released later Friday but sources said one of the men was charged with non-terror-related holding charges and is awaiting terror-related charges.

The second man was charged with terror-related charges.

Zazi was arrested in September 2009 and accused of planning to carry out acts of terrorism against the United States under the direction of al Qaeda. The FBI said he had received instruction at an al Qaeda training camp in Pakistan.
…
After feds took the suspect’s passport, the food-cart worker bolted and crashed his car on the Whitestone Expressway. Medunjanin is already on the no-fly list and has been watched by feds for months.

…The men were arrested in connection with Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan man who authorities said trained at an al-Qaeda terrorist camp. Zazi and two other men were arrested in September over an alleged plot to detonate a bomb in New York around the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
…
The two men came to attention of authorities in September during the investigation of Zazi, Margolin said. Zazi, a former Denver airport shuttle-van driver who had moved to Colorado from Queens, traveled back to New York in early September, prosecutors said.

Zazi’s actions suggested that “the defendant was intent on making a bomb and being in New York on 9/11 for purposes of perhaps using such item,” Denver Assistant U.S. Attorney Timothy Neff said at the time of his arrest.

Zazi and three unidentified associates purchased components for improvised explosive devices from July to September, the U.S. said in a conspiracy indictment unsealed Sept. 24. Investigators said they found an electronic scale that could be used to weigh chemicals and batteries that could be installed in a bomb when they searched a residence in Flushing, Queens, where Zazi stayed while in New York.

A search of a computer laptop in Zazi’s rental car turned up images of nine pages of bomb-making instructions. They included a recipe for an explosive used in the 2005 London train bombings and intended for use in the 2001 plot to blow up an airplane by “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, prosecutors said.

Officials also said Zazi was videotaped on store cameras buying products such as acetone and hydrogen peroxide that can be use to make a bomb.

Zazi has pleaded not guilty to the charges and is awaiting trial. He faces as long as life in prison if convicted.

Russian ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin said that Serbia must give up its fight for Kosovo if it wants to become a member of the NATO alliance.

He said that Russia would then have to question its stances towards Kosovo, adding that “We cannot be bigger Serbs than the Serbs themselves,” daily Blic writes.

“All NATO member-states have not recognized Kosovo. Those are Spain, Greece, Romania and Slovakia who have not. But according to international law, and the NATO statute, such a situation [not recognizing Kosovo] is an obstacle for Serbia joining the Alliance,” Rogozin said.

He said that the stance of most NATO member-states will not change, which means that the Alliance can accept Serbia as a member-state only with “new” borders — without Kosovo.

“Belgrade will have to officially recognize Priština’s sovereignty, which will also change the stances of Madrid and Moscow,” he said.
…
He reminded that NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that Serbia does not have to join NATO first if it wants to join the European Union.

Rogozin said that it is hard for him to understand how Belgrade can speak of NATO integration when there are still images in the capital of damage done by the 1999 NATO-led bombing.

“The problem of Kosovo is there as well, since most NATO member-states have recognized its independence, also, there is the demonization of the Serbian people, the flagrant anti-Serbian double-standards of the West towards participators in the wars of the former Yugoslavia…Has that been forgotten? Russia would not understand Serbia’s decision in favor of NATO considering everything I have mentioned,” Rogozin said.

In other words, this is about the dreaded sellout of the Serbs by the Serbs, and if that happens, nobody can help the Serbs.

Predictably, Bill Clinton is still alive and as healthy as ever after undergoing heart surgery on Thursday. He was finally fitted with a human heart to replace the mechanical one that was causing years of crocodile tears, and frequently malfunctioned: the tears would switch on heavily for world tragedies affecting people of color, but would dry up for Europeans that his bombs dismembered and for women that he raped.

According to Baylor University Medical Center cardiologist Clyde Yancy, “This kind of disease is progressive. It’s not a one-time event, so it really points out the need for constant surveillance.”

Which means that finally, Bill Clinton will be under surveillance. A long-awaited victory for national security indeed.

The outgoing Croatian president who has been as good as it gets for that unrepentent breed of killer known as “Croat,” Stjepan Mesic — unpopular among the more avid Ustashas who dominate the country — recently released the repressed Ustasha inside him, and shortened the grudging sentence that was given to a man who during the war killed several Serbian civilians including a 12-year-old girl and her parents. Eight years was just too much time for such a national treasure to serve:

ZAGREB — Outgoing Croatian President Stjepan Mesić has decided to shorten prison time of Siniša Rimac by one year.

Rimac was sentenced to eight years in prison when Croatia’s Supreme Court ruled that he personally took part in the executions of ethnic Serb civilians in the Pakračka Poljana region of western Slavonia in late 1991.

Rimac was also on trial for the murder of 12-year-old Aleksandra Zec and her parents – a family of wealthy Zagreb Serbs murdered in December 1991.

According to allegations, Rimac took part in those murders as well, as a member of a group commanded by Tomislav Merčep.

Merčep was at the time an adviser to the Croatian interior minister.

Although the group underwent trial and made statements admitting the crime, those statements were never admitted to evidence due to a procedural error.

The public and media accused then prosecutor Vladimir Šeks for this twist of events.

Merčep himself, who was mentioned in connection with crimes committed against Serbs in Zagreb, Vukovar, Pakračka Poljana and Gospić, never faced trial.

Earlier, Mesić also decided to shorten jail time of Stjepan Grandić by two years.

Grandić was a member of the so-called Gospić Group, found guilty and sentenced to ten years for organizing the killing of 23 Serb civilians from Perušić, near the town of Gospić, in the fall of 1991.

BELGRADE — President Boris Tadić today reacted to his Croatian counterpart Stjepan Mesić’s decision to shorten prison sentence of a Croat war criminal.
…
“When the outgoing Croatian president pardons a criminal who killed Serb children just because they are of a different ethnicity, then that is an act that deserves every condemnation, a deeply anti-civilizational and anti-European decision [coming] from the other side of common sense,” said the president.

Tadić also pointed out that Mesić’s “regrettable decision” was only one in a series, including today’s visit to Priština, “which is in a very efficient manner spoiling relations with Serbia, leaving a serious and unnecessary burden to his successor”.

Tadić stressed that it is the task of all regional countries to fully cooperate with the Hague Tribunal, and that this means that those war criminals tried before domestic courts must get their deserved punishment.

“That punishment must be justice and innocent victims served, and should in no way be reduced or annulled through discretionary decisions which essentially make crime relative and relieve the most horrid criminals of their guilt,” the president said in his statement.

Bosnian-Serb President Milorad Dodik accurately, if controversially, described Mesic as an Ustasha. That was in response to Mesic’s additional outgoing middle-finger-gesture to the Serbian nation, which took the form of threatening military action, should Republika Srpska secede from fast-Islamisizing Bosnia.

For his country’s dedicated contributions to the common Balkan goal of the dismemberment of both Yugoslavia and Serbia, including the speedy recognition in March 2008 of an independent Kosovo, Mesic was, as Tadic mentioned, invited to Pristina, where he addressed the assembly, met with the terrorist leadership, and was made an honorary citizen.

It’s hard to imagine a more appropriate sendoff.

But for balance, Mesic’s anti-Nazi alter ego gave an award to Nazi-hunter Ephraim Zuroff, “for helping Croatia to face the crimes it committed during World War II”:

Croatia’s outgoing president has decorated a prominent Nazi hunter, thanking him for helping Croatia to face the crimes it committed during World War II.

Stipe Mesic awarded Ephraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center on Monday with the Order of the King Trpimir.

Zuroff has ceaselessly pressed Croatia to prosecute those responsible for crimes in the then Nazi puppet state. One of those was eventually sentenced to 20 years in prison in 1998.

Zuroff irritated late President Franjo Tudjman, whose nationalism harked back to World War II. Zuroff said that “hardly anyone could have imagined” him getting a medal 15 years ago.

Mesic, who leaves the post later this month, is credited with moving Croatia closer to the West.

Maybe in another 60 years there’ll be an even more human-resembling Croatian president, who might be pressed to help Croatia face the crimes it committed in the 1990s, the crimes whose perpetrators this president has given a reprieve to.

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